We contacted the author, Margaret Peterson Haddix to get some background facts about the book.  She was very kind and provided us with the following information:

How did you get the idea for Running Out of Time?
I got the idea when I was working as a reporter for a newspaper in Indianapolis.  I went to do a story about people who worked at a nearby restored historical village called Conner Prairie.  Since it was their job to pretend to live in the 1800s, I asked them what it was like to live in one century and work in another.  I was intrigued that some of them said that on slow days when there weren't any tourists around, they practically forgot that it wasn't the 1800s.  That got me to thinking: what if there were a historical village where the tourists were always hidden, and the children were told it really was the past?  I thought it was a good idea for a book, but it took me a long time to figure out the book as a whole.

How long did it take you to write this book?
That depends on how you count it. I wrote the first draft very quickly, in less than two months.  But the first draft needed a lot of work, so I spent another six months or so, on and off, revising it.  Then when I started sending the book out trying to get it published, I occasionally got good suggestions for revision back with the rejection letters, so I'd go back and revise some more.  Then once I sold the book, I made more changes... all in all, about four years passed from the time I started writing to the time I stopped making changes, but I certainly wasn't working on the book full-time for four years.

How much research did you have to do for this book?
That was also something I did in bits and pieces.  I had to dig a lot to find many of the details I needed.  Unfortunately for my purposes, most history books tell about presidents and wars, not what kind of utensils ordinary people would use, or what clothes a girl on the frontier might wear.  So I ended up reading a lot about the early 1800s, just to ferret out a detail here and there.  I also made a "research trip" back to Conner Prairie, and acted like a spy - though I didn't want to copy too much from there because I really like Conner Prairie and I didn't want anyone thinking that I thought it was an evil place!  I continued researching practically the whole time I was writing, because I kept finding other details I needed.  But again, it wouldn't be accurate to say that I spent four years researching the book.

Where did you get the names of the characters?
I tried to give my characters names that would be common both in the 1840s and in the 1990s. (Jessie would have gotten very strange looks in the world outside Clifton if her name had been, say, Mehitabel) And, for the most part, I gave names I liked to characters I liked.  Though this didn't happen with Running Out of Time, with other books I've sometimes resorted to using a baby name book to find first names and the phone book to find last names.

Is there going to be a sequel?
I'm sorry, but I haven't written one yet.  I've been busy writing other books and I haven't really figured out exactly what would happen in a sequel.  Maybe someday I'll get inspired.